Reed Fagan’s Reviews > Democracy in America > Status Update

In "Author's Introduction":
"Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people....It is evident to all alike that a great democratic revolution is going on among us....It seems irresistible, because it is the most uniform, ancient, most permanent tendency in human history." Paraphrase, p. 3

Tocqueville's critiques "provide a permanent and it must be said a fruitful and useful counter-current to the natural tendencies of an egalitarian society in which the principle of vox populi vox dei must always be in some risk of overstepping its proper bounds in the realm of politics and economics to invade the realms of our private tastes, our religious convictions, and our hopes for human progress."-p.xlvi, Intro

"The three large themes that might be extracted from the second volume of the Democracy are obvious enough. The first is the quality of intellectual and cultural life in an egalitarian society; the second the stability or proneness to revolutionary upheaval of such societies; and the third, T's final and most distinctive thoughts on democratic despotism, or what one might term quiet totalitarianism." -p.xli, Intro

"...between the first and second volumes, there is something of a transition from the fear that each individual will find himself impotent in face of a spontaneous consensus and the fear that a popular leader might arise who uses the overwhelming support of the masses at his back to govern like a despot even if he observes the constitutional properties." -p.xxxi, Alan Ryan's Intro

"To the extent that a one sentence summary of so complex a work makes any sense at all, we may borrow from Tocqueville: a tendency to equality of condition is operating in the world, one so irresistible that we must ascribe it to divine influence; we can see what this process entails for America, where it has gone further than anywhere else, and we must ask what it means for Europe." -p. xxxi, Alan Ryan's Intro

Modern readers should remember 3 subtle things about Tocqueville's journey. 1) How very thoroughly T saw North America through French eyes, not English.... 2) T's picture of the character of the Americans is colored by his sense of the contrast b/w the English national character and the French.... 3) T's interest in the half-castes he encountered in the near mid-West and on the Canadian border. -paraphrase, "Intro"

"It was impossible for a Frenchman of any political stripe. Not to wonder whether a republic on the scale of a modern nation-state could be sustained, whether there was something about the Protestant origins of the New England colonists that made them peculiarly apt for Democratic citizenship, and thus not to wonder whether America was the place where French aspirations might be fulfilled." -p.xxii, Alan Ryan's Intro